businesses. Businesses care more about those things than they do about the minor differences between distributions.
And companies like to have a good company to support the OS which gives them someone to sue if things go bad.
Just out of curiosity, have you tried Canonical's support? I'll not argue about the certifications (personally, I rather loathe the concept, but I'll grant that Canonical's can't be as widespread or mature), but I haven't seen enough either way to say that Canonical's paid support is any better or worse than Red Hat's. Have you?
Not an attack/really asking - It'd be good to hear what people have to say about them.
Sean Crago Kathmandu
On Fri, Oct 31, 2008 at 8:21 PM, Sean Crago cragos@gmail.com wrote:
businesses. Businesses care more about those things than they do about the minor differences between distributions.
And companies like to have a good company to support the OS which gives them someone to sue if things go bad.
Just out of curiosity, have you tried Canonical's support? I'll not argue about the certifications (personally, I rather loathe the concept, but I'll grant that Canonical's can't be as widespread or mature), but I haven't seen enough either way to say that Canonical's paid support is any better or worse than Red Hat's. Have you?
Not an attack/really asking - It'd be good to hear what people have to say about them.
I haven't heard any good or bad about them in the server arena. Personally I think they should have went with a commercial desktop instead of trying to get a piece of the server pie.
On Sat, Nov 1, 2008 at 7:27 AM, Arthur Pemberton pemboa@gmail.com wrote:
On Fri, Oct 31, 2008 at 8:21 PM, Sean Crago cragos@gmail.com wrote:
businesses. Businesses care more about those things than they do about the minor differences between distributions.
And companies like to have a good company to support the OS which gives them someone to sue if things go bad.
Just out of curiosity, have you tried Canonical's support? I'll not argue about the certifications (personally, I rather loathe the concept, but I'll grant that Canonical's can't be as widespread or mature), but I haven't seen enough either way to say that Canonical's paid support is any better or worse than Red Hat's. Have you?
Not an attack/really asking - It'd be good to hear what people have to say about them.
I haven't heard any good or bad about them in the server arena. Personally I think they should have went with a commercial desktop instead of trying to get a piece of the server pie.
-- Fedora 9 : sulphur is good for the skin ( www.pembo13.com )
I've used them on a number of projects, including my current personal server, and I've been quite happy. It's like Debian, but with an active community around it and the option of commercial support. Debian always had a strong reputation as a server & developer OS. Throwing on a fancier installation routine and polishing up the desktop doesn't change that much, and that's basically all that Ubuntu did. Can't find many meaningful deviations in packages other than the kernel and the GUI stuff.
On Fri, Oct 31, 2008 at 9:12 PM, Sean Crago cragos@gmail.com wrote:
On Sat, Nov 1, 2008 at 7:27 AM, Arthur Pemberton pemboa@gmail.com wrote:
On Fri, Oct 31, 2008 at 8:21 PM, Sean Crago cragos@gmail.com wrote:
businesses. Businesses care more about those things than they do about the minor differences between distributions.
And companies like to have a good company to support the OS which gives them someone to sue if things go bad.
Just out of curiosity, have you tried Canonical's support? I'll not argue about the certifications (personally, I rather loathe the concept, but I'll grant that Canonical's can't be as widespread or mature), but I haven't seen enough either way to say that Canonical's paid support is any better or worse than Red Hat's. Have you?
Not an attack/really asking - It'd be good to hear what people have to say about them.
I haven't heard any good or bad about them in the server arena. Personally I think they should have went with a commercial desktop instead of trying to get a piece of the server pie.
-- Fedora 9 : sulphur is good for the skin ( www.pembo13.com )
I've used them on a number of projects, including my current personal server,
The commercial support? I think that's what the dude asked about.
In terms of support staff, vendor partnerships, professional services, training, licensed support providers, etc it's like comparing the New York Yankees to the Kansas City T-bones. It's not about who you can call on the phone - it's about everything else.
They're nice, they can help out companies and can provide some good support, but for large businesses they're simply not on the same planet - not yet.
Ubuntu was designed to be a desktop OS. RHEL is an enterprise OS. Red Hat has built a pretty impressive support organization around it. Canonical is probably still 5-10 years away from being there, assuming they get traction in the business world.
Yes, RHEL licenses and so forth will cost them more than probably Canonical will, but then again if they have a network layout as he described, then Red Hat's fees won't faze them at all. What they'll probably want is assurance and capability.
Jeffrey.
On Fri, Oct 31, 2008 at 8:21 PM, Sean Crago cragos@gmail.com wrote:
Just out of curiosity, have you tried Canonical's support? I'll not argue about the certifications (personally, I rather loathe the concept, but I'll grant that Canonical's can't be as widespread or mature), but I haven't seen enough either way to say that Canonical's paid support is any better or worse than Red Hat's. Have you?
Not an attack/really asking - It'd be good to hear what people have to say about them.
At this point in the inning, Ubuntu is the first known option. As part of my job, I would be in extreme error if I didn't look at all of the options. Looks like my weekend will involve downloading SuSE and Redhat enterprise versions :)
Sent from my mobile phone
On Nov 1, 2008, at 1:45 AM, "Jeffrey Watts" <jeffrey.w.watts@gmail.commailto:jeffrey.w.watts@gmail.com> wrote:
In terms of support staff, vendor partnerships, professional services, training, licensed support providers, etc it's like comparing the New York Yankees to the Kansas City T-bones. It's not about who you can call on the phone - it's about everything else.
They're nice, they can help out companies and can provide some good support, but for large businesses they're simply not on the same planet - not yet.
Ubuntu was designed to be a desktop OS. RHEL is an enterprise OS. Red Hat has built a pretty impressive support organization around it. Canonical is probably still 5-10 years away from being there, assuming they get traction in the business world.
Yes, RHEL licenses and so forth will cost them more than probably Canonical will, but then again if they have a network layout as he described, then Red Hat's fees won't faze them at all. What they'll probably want is assurance and capability.
Jeffrey.
On Fri, Oct 31, 2008 at 8:21 PM, Sean Crago <mailto:cragos@gmail.comcragos@gmail.commailto:cragos@gmail.com> wrote:
Just out of curiosity, have you tried Canonical's support? I'll not argue about the certifications (personally, I rather loathe the concept, but I'll grant that Canonical's can't be as widespread or mature), but I haven't seen enough either way to say that Canonical's paid support is any better or worse than Red Hat's. Have you?
Not an attack/really asking - It'd be good to hear what people have to say about them.
--
"He that would make his own liberty secure must guard even his enemy from oppression; for if he violates this duty he establishes a precedent that will reach to himself." -- Thomas Paine
Michael,
Be careful. All of the options include hundreds if not thousands of distributions. I'd stick to evaluating the major ones if I were you. The three major ancestries of GNU+Linux are RedHat, Debian, and Slackware.
You shouldn't get too hung up on distros. GNU+Linux is GNU+Linux. If a program works in one distro, and you can get sources, you can usually make it work in any distro with a little time and patience. The differences you should get a feel for are how configuration is managed, how good support is on the net or on the phone, how software installation is managed, and documentation.
------------
Slackware is more of a hobbyiest OS, and while it works fine, its not something I'd imagine seeing in many enterprise arenas because package management is so important today, and Slackware's package management system is, well, eccentric. Slackware is published by a man named Patrick Volkerding. Slackware is Free Software, and gratis (available at no charge).
SuSE (SLED and SLES) is the largest modern embodiment of the Slackware branch today. It is published by Novell. While it is Free Software, it is not gratis (you have to pay money for it, and you get support). If you want SuSE to demo, you can get OpenSUSE, which Novell does make available gratis (free of charge). Make sure you experience it's configuration program yast. It is central to administration in SuSE.
Download Slackware at: http://www.slackware.com/getslack/ Download OpenSUSE at: http://software.opensuse.org/
------------
Debian is focused more on developer community and organization, than commerce, but that's not to say it won't work in a datacenter or on your desk. I work with someone who uses Debian every day, and he seems to tolerate it well. There's no single official company you'd buy Debian from and get support. Debian is Free Software and gratis (you can download it without paying).
Ubuntu is derived from Debian, and published by Canonical. Ubuntu is Free Software, and gratis. Canonical officially sells support, but I don't know anyone who buys it though. Ubuntu is more focused on user community, and "usability". I only put that in quotes, because its not like they're the only people who want the computer to be usable. Everyone does. Ubuntu just tends to put simple user experience more above other concerns than do other distributions.
Download Debian at: http://www.debian.org/distrib/ Download Ubuntu at: http://www.ubuntu.com/GetUbuntu/download
------------
RedHat was the first major distribution to be commercially sold. It was also avaliable at no charge originally. It was published by RedHat Inc. Today there is not a distro called RedHat. It's been split in to RHEL, and Fedora. RHEL is the "enterprisey", supported, and for-pay distro, and Fedora is the community project. RHEL intentionally excludes new software and advances so that by the time something gets included in RHEL it's not a gimmik, and it's time tested in addition to being validated by a number of vendors. RHEL does not change often. In general, when you see "Supports Linux" on a physical product, in a manual, or on a spec sheet, they're referring to RHEL. RHEL is Free Software, but is not gratis. You have to pay for it, and you get official support. RHEL is supported for extremely long. If you install RHEL on a server, the hardware will very likely become obsolete before support ends. It's not fancy. It's for the long haul.
Fedora is published by RedHat, and developed and controlled by a mix of RedHat employees, and external community. It is Free Software, and gratis. Fedora strives to include all the latest technologies and software. It also has a strong focus on only officially supporting Free Software. Things like DVDs, MP3's, and proprietary drivers are intentionally excluded from inclusion in official Fedora releases because those technologies are encumbered by restrictive patents or licenses. Fedora is released often (every 6 months), and "supported" for a relatively short period of time (eleven months from the initial release date). Fedora often retires technologies that didn't get used much or weren't as useful as originally hoped, and each release is an opportunity to make sweeping changes.
CentOS is a gratis recompile of RHEL. RedHat chooses to make their sourcecode available to download gratis even though they don't make RHEL itself available gratis. The CentOS development team literally just download the RHEL sourcecode, replace all redhat copyrighted or trademarked images and strings, and recompile. It is 100% compatible with anything that works on RHEL, and basically IS RHEL, unless you're asking for support. When you're googling for something about CentOS, you can usually substitute "rhel", and get a result in some of RedHat Inc's excellent documentation, which they make available free of charge.
Sign up for a RHEL trial at: https://www.redhat.com/apps/webform.html?event_type=simple_form&eid=871 Download Fedora at: http://fedoraproject.org/get-fedora Download Centos at: http://mirror.centos.org/centos/5/isos/
------------
I run Fedora Rawhide on my laptop at the moment, which is a nightly build of the very latest from Fedora. It is in effect the pre-alpha testbed of what will become the next Fedora release. I expect a few quirks, but there's not been anything I couldn't work through so far. If you come to a meeting, I'd be glad to show you how it works.
If the "Free Software not being free of charge" thing is confusing, understand the Free means Freedom, and is in no way related to monetary cost. It means people who receive the program or OS are entitled to its source code, and several rights regarding that. See http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html
You might wish to refer to this distro timeline to get a feel for what's related to what: http://futurist.se/gldt/gldt76.png
-Billy
On Sat, Nov 1, 2008 at 03:23, Haworth, Michael A. Michael_Haworth@pas-technologies.com wrote:
At this point in the inning, Ubuntu is the first known option. As part of my job, I would be in extreme error if I didn't look at all of the options. Looks like my weekend will involve downloading SuSE and Redhat enterprise versions :)
On Sat, Nov 1, 2008 at 7:33 AM, Billy Crook billycrook@gmail.com wrote:
Michael,
Fedora is published by RedHat, and developed and controlled by a mix of RedHat employees, and external community. It is Free Software, and gratis. Fedora strives to include all the latest technologies and software. It also has a strong focus on only officially supporting Free Software. Things like DVDs, MP3's, and proprietary drivers are intentionally excluded from inclusion in official Fedora releases because those technologies are encumbered by restrictive patents or licenses. Fedora is released often (every 6 months), and "supported" for a relatively short period of time (eleven months from the initial release date). Fedora often retires technologies that didn't get used much or weren't as useful as originally hoped, and each release is an opportunity to make sweeping changes.
Just a note about Fedora from a proud Fedora user: If a cool piece of software comes out that is known to eat children and kittens, and it's FOSS, and finds a maintainer, Fedora will include it. Somethings in Fedora can be extremely bleeding edge: often working with things long before they get picked up by Ubuntu and others.
Contrastingly however, core parts of the distro such as Python and Gnome are often a lot more conservative.
I will also add though, maintaining your own intermediate repo (which is essential for a large deployment anyways) will take most/all the unwanted edge off of Fedora.
I personally suggest using CentOS on the server, and maintain a budget to hire a consultant/contractor any time something goes above the heads of your team.
---- Fedora 9 : sulphur is good for the skin ( www.pembo13.com )
On Sat, Nov 1, 2008 at 7:33 AM, Billy Crook billycrook@gmail.com wrote:
Michael,
Be careful. All of the options include hundreds if not thousands of distributions. I'd stick to evaluating the major ones if I were you. The three major ancestries of GNU+Linux are RedHat, Debian, and Slackware.
I guess BSD doesn't get included because Gentoo isn't "major."
On Sat, Nov 1, 2008 at 4:04 PM, David Nicol davidnicol@gmail.com wrote:
On Sat, Nov 1, 2008 at 7:33 AM, Billy Crook billycrook@gmail.com wrote:
Michael,
Be careful. All of the options include hundreds if not thousands of distributions. I'd stick to evaluating the major ones if I were you. The three major ancestries of GNU+Linux are RedHat, Debian, and Slackware.
I guess BSD doesn't get included because Gentoo isn't "major."
I think it wasn't included because BSD, as I understand it, isn't Linux. And this is a Linux user group.
On Sat, Nov 1, 2008 at 4:20 PM, Arthur Pemberton pemboa@gmail.com wrote:
On Sat, Nov 1, 2008 at 4:04 PM, David Nicol davidnicol@gmail.com wrote:
On Sat, Nov 1, 2008 at 7:33 AM, Billy Crook billycrook@gmail.com wrote:
Michael,
Be careful. All of the options include hundreds if not thousands of distributions. I'd stick to evaluating the major ones if I were you. The three major ancestries of GNU+Linux are RedHat, Debian, and Slackware.
I guess BSD doesn't get included because Gentoo isn't "major."
I think it wasn't included because BSD, as I understand it, isn't Linux. And this is a Linux user group.
It also isn't "major," and neither is Gentoo.
Right, BSD isn't linux, it's a major distribution of Unix. Gentoo however, is linux (It uses a slackware base I believe, but it is influenced heavily by BSD. It still runs the linux kernel though!).
However, unless you're interested in learning how everything works together, or you absolutely HAVE to have every ounce of performance your machine can push out, I don't see a reason to discuss Gentoo with a *nix newbie. Likewise, there is absolutely no room in the corporate environment for Gentoo...it takes too much time to get a stable system running, and the corporate environment doesn't need what it offers.
Before you flame me, know, I do run Gentoo on one of my servers at home, and I absolutely love it. It just isn't suited for the discussion at hand :)
Billy - excellent post! Thank You!
Nathan
On Sat, Nov 1, 2008 at 4:31 PM, Christofer C. Bell < christofer.c.bell@gmail.com> wrote:
On Sat, Nov 1, 2008 at 4:20 PM, Arthur Pemberton pemboa@gmail.com wrote:
On Sat, Nov 1, 2008 at 4:04 PM, David Nicol davidnicol@gmail.com
wrote:
On Sat, Nov 1, 2008 at 7:33 AM, Billy Crook billycrook@gmail.com
wrote:
Michael,
Be careful. All of the options include hundreds if not thousands of distributions. I'd stick to evaluating the major ones if I were you. The three major ancestries of GNU+Linux are RedHat, Debian, and Slackware.
I guess BSD doesn't get included because Gentoo isn't "major."
I think it wasn't included because BSD, as I understand it, isn't Linux. And this is a Linux user group.
It also isn't "major," and neither is Gentoo.
-- Chris _______________________________________________ Kclug mailing list Kclug@kclug.org http://kclug.org/mailman/listinfo/kclug
the distributrions are all differentiated by their packaging systems, and then by choices t of what-goes-where, which affects interoperatbility, then by choice of library versions, which also affects interoperability, then by sysadmin interface. Gentoo uses a modified version of the BSD ports packaging system. Debian has "apt." Red Hat has "rpm" and the rpm wrapper "yum." All these package formats are mature.
On Sat, Nov 1, 2008 at 4:47 PM, Nathan Cerny ncerny@gmail.com wrote:
Likewise, there is absolutely no room in the corporate environment for Gentoo...it takes too much time to get a stable system running, and the corporate environment doesn't need what it offers.
The things a corporate environment could use that gentoo offers are:
centralization of configuration management (although this is also offered by others) more secure because not using widely distributed binaries; possible to enforce that all systems corp-wide are compiled using [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stack-smashing_protection StackGuard or similar]
If you want full control, though, "Linux From Scratch" recipes may be better. Gentoo offers a LFS-like situation where a lot of the groundwork is already done, and everything can get branded OurCorp instead of Fedora.
With all due respect, having worked in a corporate environment for the last ten years I can say that these things are probably not things that corporations emphasize.
In regards to uniquely compiled binaries - this would make auditing and testing a nightmare. If you have 100 identical webservers, having 100 different Apache binaries is a terrible idea. You want to have a test environment where you test ONE binary and deploy that ONE binary across the entire platform. You can then guarantee that that tested binary will work properly and is secure.
As far as branding goes, unless the product a company is selling is an operating system, using Linux From Scratch to have a "branded" OS doesn't seem very useful. After all, if ZapperTed's wants a snazzy corporate themed desktop they can always just modify SLES, RHEL, or Ubuntu to use the corp's logo as a wallpaper and have fancy icons and such. But to be perfectly honest the most that any company really does is put a corp wallpaper on a desktop, and you can do that with any distribution.
The StackGuard thing is a good point, though, but I feel that given the nature of most corporate environments where you can have systems as old as 10 years still in use most security efforts rely on securing the network, not the systems. Yes, system security is important, but there are usually many systems that can't be upgraded and thus the #1 emphasis is the firewall and access security.
Here is a short (and undoubtely incomplete) set of things that corporations desire:
1) Vendor support 2) 3rd Party support 3) Stability 4) Length of support (EOL) 5) Scalability 6) Security 7) Compatibility
The only two distributions that really fit this bill right now are Red Hat Enterprise Linux and SuSE Linux Enterprise Server. My opinion is that of these two, RHEL is the better product.
Wearing my Linux advocacy hat, I'd recommend NOT doing business with Novell (SuSE) since they sold out to Microsoft. I'd also not recommend using CentOS, as they're undercutting Red Hat's business model and I think that's really uncool (sure it's legal, but it's not moral). I think most businesses serious about their IT but interested in saving money should use Fedora for the clients, RHEL for the server. Best of both worlds.
As far as security goes, I'd argue that RHEL and Fedora can probably be made more secure than any other distribution because of the fact that they were the first to support SELinux. SuSE does not. Ubuntu does, but to be honest given how recent their support of it is, I wouldn't want to use an Enforcing mode SELinux on Ubuntu yet, as it takes quite a long time to get the kinks worked out.
Michael, in case you don't know what Security Enhanced Linux is, it's a set of kernel-level high security modules developed by the NSA. In my opinion it's absolutely essential for core network servers.
SELinux can be very confusing to even experienced Unix admins on first using it, but once you get the hang of it it's actually really slick. All of Red Hat's training teaches how to provide services that are secured via TCP wrappers, ipchains, and SELinux. Their training is excellent - best I've ever been through, hands down (I've taken SGI and Sun training as well as internal Sprint training).
Again, if you're new to Linux and your business is thinking of using Linux, I can't recommend Red Hat enough. When I was on the Sprint Linux Evaluation team four years ago they were the stand-out vendor (with the notable exception of the IBM mainframe world, where SuSE had an edge).
In terms of support contracts, many companies offer authorized RHEL support. I'd recommend looking at getting support from Red Hat directly, however, as my company has had some mediocre experiences with getting RHEL support from HP. IBM may be better, as they're very well known for their professional services and support, but you can't go wrong with getting support directly from Red Hat.
Let me know if you have any more questions. I work for Sprint on extremely mission critical systems, and we're got a project to move my platform from SGI IRIX on Origin hardware to RHEL on HP Integrity systems in 2010. My systems alone do about $12 billion a year in business, so if your management has any concerns about the ability of Linux to do "real work", you can take it from me that yes, it can. :)
Good luck Michael. Jeffrey.
On Sun, Nov 2, 2008 at 10:40 AM, David Nicol davidnicol@gmail.com wrote:
The things a corporate environment could use that gentoo offers are:
centralization of configuration management (although this is also offered by others) more secure because not using widely distributed binaries; possible to enforce that all systems corp-wide are compiled using [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stack-smashing_protection StackGuard or similar]
If you want full control, though, "Linux From Scratch" recipes may be better. Gentoo offers a LFS-like situation where a lot of the groundwork is already done, and everything can get branded OurCorp instead of Fedora.
On Sun, Nov 2, 2008 at 3:27 PM, Jeffrey Watts jeffrey.w.watts@gmail.com wrote:
In regards to uniquely compiled binaries - this would make auditing and testing a nightmare. If you have 100 identical webservers, having 100 different Apache binaries is a terrible idea. You want to have a test environment where you test ONE binary and deploy that ONE binary across the entire platform. You can then guarantee that that tested binary will work properly and is secure.
Setting exactly that scenario up, to support internal distribution of binaries compiled once and pushed internally, happens to be easier to set up with Gentoo than with other distribution frameworks, which is why after several weeks of research I wound up recommending standardizing on an in-house Gentoo-derived system when I was tasked with the assignment of composing such a recomendation.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portage_(software)#Binary_Packages
The feature set I was looking for included:
* an existing stream of security patches and ease of application * rapid deployment of new nodes * rapid configuration of a new node into a standard configuration * easy definition of standard configurations * no interference with upstream patches to packages in use
This list does not include "vendor support." The client for whom I made that call takes great pride in the depth and breadth of their system administration skills.
I was surprised by my finding, as I am a fan of Debian, but setting up and maintaining in-house ebuilds happens to take fewer keystrokes than setting up and maintaining custom debs, especially when it comes to selecting from available updates.
I do not know if the client for whom I made the recommendation has followed it or not. I am curious, I would appreciate it if anyone on this list who still works there could give me an update on the progress of that project.
On Sun, Nov 2, 2008 at 4:50 PM, David Nicol davidnicol@gmail.com wrote:
On Sun, Nov 2, 2008 at 3:27 PM, Jeffrey Watts jeffrey.w.watts@gmail.com wrote:
In regards to uniquely compiled binaries - this would make auditing and testing a nightmare. If you have 100 identical webservers, having 100 different Apache binaries is a terrible idea. You want to have a test environment where you test ONE binary and deploy that ONE binary across the entire platform. You can then guarantee that that tested binary will work properly and is secure.
Setting exactly that scenario up, to support internal distribution of binaries compiled once and pushed internally, happens to be easier to set up with Gentoo
How so? I am curious as to the details. I had assumed it would be just as easy for any system with a package management framework.
I appreciate this, but one of the primary jobs of any system administrator is to make sure the infrastructure can be easily maintained by a successor. I'm simply not convinced that Gentoo can deliver this.
If there is an SSH vulnerability for example, Red Hat will notify me and I can test the patch internally. Via a very simple series of commands I can deploy this regression tested patch across my network. While I can imagine my part of the puzzle being similar in difficulty to Gentoo, I fail to see how Gentoo could possibly have the resources to internally test and vet the changes before making them available. Red Hat can. Novell can.
Distributions like Gentoo simply aren't tested enough for businesses to rely on. I'm sure that there are plenty of anecdotal cases such as yours where a competent sysadmin was able to make all of it work, and work well. But most businesses can't always count on having really good sysadmins, or can't devote their sysadmin time to maintaining something unique. There is a distinct value in having a tried, true, dependable vendor that makes tested, reliable products.
I'm sorry, but Gentoo is not appropriate for business. There is almost nothing about the distribution that is business-friendly - in fact I'd argue that it is in almost every way the exact opposite of what a business would want. That's not a bad thing, Gentoo's a hobbyist OS. Conversely, I wouldn't recommend RHEL for home users, as it's not meant for hobbyists or home desktops. Yes, RHEL has a webbrowser and can play some games, but that doesn't mean it's good for grandma. For the same reason just because Gentoo can run Apache and PostgreSQL doesn't mean it should be used on a production server.
Jeffrey.
On Sun, Nov 2, 2008 at 4:50 PM, David Nicol davidnicol@gmail.com wrote:
This list does not include "vendor support." The client for whom I made that call takes great pride in the depth and breadth of their system administration skills.
I was surprised by my finding, as I am a fan of Debian, but setting up and maintaining in-house ebuilds happens to take fewer keystrokes than setting up and maintaining custom debs, especially when it comes to selecting from available updates.
I do not know if the client for whom I made the recommendation has followed it or not. I am curious, I would appreciate it if anyone on this list who still works there could give me an update on the progress of that project.
On Sun, Nov 2, 2008 at 3:27 PM, Jeffrey Watts jeffrey.w.watts@gmail.comwrote:
I'd also not recommend using CentOS, as they're undercutting Red Hat's business model and I think that's really uncool (sure it's legal, but it's not moral).
That is simply untrue. CentOS is every bit as moral as Red Hat itself, and everyone else who abides by the spirit (as well as the letter) of the GPL. The people who use GPL code but don't play fair are the immoral ones. We all draw that line in slightly different places (see "Tivoization") but CentOS is on the "fair" side, at least from where I sit.
Red Hat gets to use the work of everyone who contributes code under the GPL or a compatible license, and it's perfectly moral for them to do that, because those contributors have agreed that it's OK with them. That makes it every bit as moral for CentOS to use the code too.
What would be IMmoral would be for CentOS to use RH logos, or to represent in some way that RH will support CentOS users, or is responsible for any changes that CentOS may introduce once they have the sources. They don't do that. They make it clear that they are recompiling the source that Red Hat releases under the GPL. They even avoid using the words "Red Hat" except where it would be legally forbidden without Red Hat's express permission (see http://www.opencontent.org/openpub/).
Red Hat's business model is fundamentally the same as Novell or Canonical's: They sell support. The difference is that Red Hat only distributes the RH-branded product to its support customers, while Canonical has promised us that they'll never split the code base over support licensing. One reason: making a pay-only version could make many of us suspect that it's wandered over into that questionable-morality area. The very existence of clones like CentOS proves that Red Hat is abiding by their moral and legal commitments to the countless coders whose work they use, proving that RH is a good community member. That gives them geek cred to go along with the PHBs feeling all warm-n-fuzzy about doing business with The Name In Linux.
Red Hat gains something else of value from the cloners' existence: There is now a far larger base of machines running binaries compiled from the same sources that RH uses, so if a CentOS user finds a bug, and reports it to the CentOS folks, they can confirm that the bug does in fact exist, write it up and get information to upstream, which would include RH. RH isn't having to do any work to support these machines but gets these gamma testers to help them find bugs.
And, of course, some CentOS users will decide they want support, and buy Red Hat. In that respect, CentOS can be a powerful marketing tool for RH; it allows a prospective customer to build a server, install CentOS and the apps they want to run on it, and do a shakedown cruise. Once that looks good, they may choose to install branded and supported RHEL, and sleep well knowing that someone has their back.
On Sun, Nov 2, 2008 at 9:36 PM, Monty J. Harder mjharder@gmail.com wrote:
On Sun, Nov 2, 2008 at 3:27 PM, Jeffrey Watts jeffrey.w.watts@gmail.com wrote:
I'd also not recommend using CentOS, as they're undercutting Red Hat's business model and I think that's really uncool (sure it's legal, but it's not moral).
That is simply untrue. CentOS is every bit as moral as Red Hat itself, and everyone else who abides by the spirit (as well as the letter) of the GPL. The people who use GPL code but don't play fair are the immoral ones. We all draw that line in slightly different places (see "Tivoization") but CentOS is on the "fair" side, at least from where I sit.
Red Hat gets to use the work of everyone who contributes code under the GPL or a compatible license, and it's perfectly moral for them to do that, because those contributors have agreed that it's OK with them. That makes it every bit as moral for CentOS to use the code too.
What would be IMmoral would be for CentOS to use RH logos, or to represent in some way that RH will support CentOS users, or is responsible for any changes that CentOS may introduce once they have the sources. They don't do that. They make it clear that they are recompiling the source that Red Hat releases under the GPL. They even avoid using the words "Red Hat" except where it would be legally forbidden without Red Hat's express permission (see http://www.opencontent.org/openpub/).
Red Hat's business model is fundamentally the same as Novell or Canonical's: They sell support. The difference is that Red Hat only distributes the RH-branded product to its support customers, while Canonical has promised us that they'll never split the code base over support licensing. One reason: making a pay-only version could make many of us suspect that it's wandered over into that questionable-morality area. The very existence of clones like CentOS proves that Red Hat is abiding by their moral and legal commitments to the countless coders whose work they use, proving that RH is a good community member. That gives them geek cred to go along with the PHBs feeling all warm-n-fuzzy about doing business with The Name In Linux.
Red Hat gains something else of value from the cloners' existence: There is now a far larger base of machines running binaries compiled from the same sources that RH uses, so if a CentOS user finds a bug, and reports it to the CentOS folks, they can confirm that the bug does in fact exist, write it up and get information to upstream, which would include RH. RH isn't having to do any work to support these machines but gets these gamma testers to help them find bugs.
And, of course, some CentOS users will decide they want support, and buy Red Hat. In that respect, CentOS can be a powerful marketing tool for RH; it allows a prospective customer to build a server, install CentOS and the apps they want to run on it, and do a shakedown cruise. Once that looks good, they may choose to install branded and supported RHEL, and sleep well knowing that someone has their back.
At the very least, RedHat's PR people, CEO, and staff within the community all like (at least claim to) Centos. Centos may very well may be suggested more often within the Fedora community than Fedora itself, especially for stagnant server machines.
That said, I think people consider RedHat's "splitting off" of the non-commercial portion way more contreversial than need be and take it way too personally.
I agree, Red Hat should never have distanced itself as much as it did from Fedora in the beginning. It was a big mistake, and they've mentioned that numerous times. The good news is that Fedora really started coming together with about release 3, and the community and Red Hat are working really well together right now.
I personally believe the two finest distributions out there currently are Ubuntu and Fedora (of the non-business kind). I've heard some good things about OpenSuSE, but I haven't really seen any good examples of where they've provided leadership recently, though. I'd like to hear from folks who use it though if I'm wrong.
And again, I have a pretty severe view of CentOS, one that's not shared by everyone. However after seeing the really slimy thing that Mandrake (now Mandriva) did by taking Red Hat Linux, adding KDE, and underbidding Red Hat on the Macmillan distribution deal back in 1999ish, I've become of the opinion that it's important for the community to make sure to support the folks doing the work.
Jeffrey.
On Sun, Nov 2, 2008 at 10:48 PM, Arthur Pemberton pemboa@gmail.com wrote:
At the very least, RedHat's PR people, CEO, and staff within the community all like (at least claim to) Centos. Centos may very well may be suggested more often within the Fedora community than Fedora itself, especially for stagnant server machines.
That said, I think people consider RedHat's "splitting off" of the non-commercial portion way more contreversial than need be and take it way too personally.
I appreciate your position, but you have to realize that if you're using CentOS, you're not using it for the GPLed parts. You're using it because Red Hat built and regression tested an extremely stable distribution. You're using it because Red Hat spent the time and money to make third party apps like Oracle run well on it. You're using it because they took the time to integrate things like SELinux.
If making a stable enterprise OS were trivial, there wouldn't be a CentOS project - folks would just use something else. Every person that uses CentOS because it's "cheaper" are taking dollars away from Red Hat. Like or dislike them, they are probably the single largest contributers of code to the Linux community (though I believe IBM is a close second now). The dollars that folks spend to buy RHEL fund the Linux community directly.
Sure, it's legal to re-apportion GPLed code, and Red Hat certainly doesn't stop the CentOS folks from taking their work. But it's uncool. Free Software is not about free beer. If folks want an enterprise quality distribution they ought to support the company that worked hard to provide it. If you want to use RHEL and don't want to pay for it, I would recommend that you use Fedora.
As I said before, this is my opinion. One can certainly do what they want, as it's certainly legal. But I for one believe in investing in the Linux community with my wallet.
Jeffrey.
On Sun, Nov 2, 2008 at 9:36 PM, Monty J. Harder mjharder@gmail.com wrote:
That is simply untrue. CentOS is every bit as moral as Red Hat itself, and everyone else who abides by the spirit (as well as the letter) of the GPL. The people who use GPL code but don't play fair are the immoral ones. We all draw that line in slightly different places (see "Tivoization") but CentOS is on the "fair" side, at least from where I sit.
Red Hat gets to use the work of everyone who contributes code under the GPL or a compatible license, and it's perfectly moral for them to do that, because those contributors have agreed that it's OK with them. That makes it every bit as moral for CentOS to use the code too.
What would be IMmoral would be for CentOS to use RH logos, or to represent in some way that RH will support CentOS users, or is responsible for any changes that CentOS may introduce once they have the sources. They don't do that. They make it clear that they are recompiling the source that Red Hat releases under the GPL. They even avoid using the words "Red Hat" except where it would be legally forbidden without Red Hat's express permission (see http://www.opencontent.org/openpub/).
Red Hat's business model is fundamentally the same as Novell or Canonical's: They sell support. The difference is that Red Hat only distributes the RH-branded product to its support customers, while Canonical has promised us that they'll never split the code base over support licensing. One reason: making a pay-only version could make many of us suspect that it's wandered over into that questionable-morality area. The very existence of clones like CentOS proves that Red Hat is abiding by their moral and legal commitments to the countless coders whose work they use, proving that RH is a good community member. That gives them geek cred to go along with the PHBs feeling all warm-n-fuzzy about doing business with The Name In Linux.
Red Hat gains something else of value from the cloners' existence: There is now a far larger base of machines running binaries compiled from the same sources that RH uses, so if a CentOS user finds a bug, and reports it to the CentOS folks, they can confirm that the bug does in fact exist, write it up and get information to upstream, which would include RH. RH isn't having to do any work to support these machines but gets these gamma testers to help them find bugs.
And, of course, some CentOS users will decide they want support, and buy Red Hat. In that respect, CentOS can be a powerful marketing tool for RH; it allows a prospective customer to build a server, install CentOS and the apps they want to run on it, and do a shakedown cruise. Once that looks good, they may choose to install branded and supported RHEL, and sleep well knowing that someone has their back.
On Sun, Nov 2, 2008 at 11:25 PM, Jeffrey Watts jeffrey.w.watts@gmail.com wrote:
I appreciate your position, but you have to realize that if you're using CentOS, you're not using it for the GPLed parts. You're using it because Red Hat built and regression tested an extremely stable distribution. You're using it because Red Hat spent the time and money to make third party apps like Oracle run well on it. You're using it because they took the time to integrate things like SELinux.
If making a stable enterprise OS were trivial, there wouldn't be a CentOS project - folks would just use something else. Every person that uses CentOS because it's "cheaper" are taking dollars away from Red Hat. Like or dislike them, they are probably the single largest contributers of code to the Linux community (though I believe IBM is a close second now). The dollars that folks spend to buy RHEL fund the Linux community directly.
Sure, it's legal to re-apportion GPLed code, and Red Hat certainly doesn't stop the CentOS folks from taking their work. But it's uncool. Free Software is not about free beer. If folks want an enterprise quality distribution they ought to support the company that worked hard to provide it. If you want to use RHEL and don't want to pay for it, I would recommend that you use Fedora.
As I said before, this is my opinion. One can certainly do what they want, as it's certainly legal. But I for one believe in investing in the Linux community with my wallet.
Jeffrey.
It's a fair opinion. And I agree with it overall, even the "taking dollars away from Red Hat" as that is more or less a fact.
However RedHat's pricing, while fair, is beyond the reach of some. It would be good to see them provide a cheaper version with less/lower priority support. Doing so would probably get them a piece of Centos' pie as well.
I think we can both completely agree on that. It would be nice if they could find a way to have a "smaller" product for small businesses that was in between. I find myself advocating RHEL on core servers, Fedora on everything else too often.
Jeffrey.
On Sun, Nov 2, 2008 at 11:34 PM, Arthur Pemberton pemboa@gmail.com wrote:
It's a fair opinion. And I agree with it overall, even the "taking dollars away from Red Hat" as that is more or less a fact.
However RedHat's pricing, while fair, is beyond the reach of some. It would be good to see them provide a cheaper version with less/lower priority support. Doing so would probably get them a piece of Centos' pie as well.
I think that in today's corporate world there needs to be a mix of OS's that provide the best capabilities available. One cannot be tied into a single OS to do all the work because there are strengths and weaknesses in all of them. When it comes to desktops I think that Linux is a good choice because pretty much any major distribution is stable enough. When it comes to the server environment, everyone keeps talking about how the desktop distros will support Exchange, so you will probably still have some Windows servers somewhere in your environment. Other servers may be a combination of Windows and Linux.
What I think is being overlooked is when you're trying to manage hundreds of desktops spread across several buildings it is imperative to have a centralized management solution, whether it is for Windows or Linux. This is where VMWare is a good choice. Using a small number of desktop images that are built and tested to make sure they are working as a base to serve a Virtual Desktop Infrastructure would work well and need a very small desktop machine to function. Also, you could use a PXE server to provide a similar type of solution but would need a more robust desktop machine.
I think what I am trying to say is no matter what you do and the mix of OS's that you use, the expense in a computer environment is not is the purchase of the equipment, software or implementation, it is the cost of the ongoing support, maintenance and operations (power cost, addition of desktops, replacement/repair of desktops, etc...) of the equipment. Implementing one solution over another on the front-end can cost huge amounts of money on the backend. Make sure that you are not blinded about the end cost by the lower dollar amounts on the front end.
Phil
From: kclug-bounces@kclug.org [mailto:kclug-bounces@kclug.org] On Behalf Of Jeffrey Watts Sent: Sunday, November 02, 2008 11:40 PM To: Arthur Pemberton Cc: KCLUG Subject: Re: Conversion to Linux
I think we can both completely agree on that. It would be nice if they could find a way to have a "smaller" product for small businesses that was in between. I find myself advocating RHEL on core servers, Fedora on everything else too often.
Jeffrey.
On Sun, Nov 2, 2008 at 11:34 PM, Arthur Pemberton pemboa@gmail.com wrote:
It's a fair opinion. And I agree with it overall, even the "taking dollars away from Red Hat" as that is more or less a fact.
However RedHat's pricing, while fair, is beyond the reach of some. It would be good to see them provide a cheaper version with less/lower priority support. Doing so would probably get them a piece of Centos' pie as well.
On Sun, Nov 2, 2008 at 11:25 PM, Jeffrey Watts jeffrey.w.watts@gmail.comwrote:
I appreciate your position, but you have to realize that if you're using CentOS, you're not using it for the GPLed parts. You're using it because Red Hat built and regression tested an extremely stable distribution. You're using it because Red Hat spent the time and money to make third party apps like Oracle run well on it. You're using it because they took the time to integrate things like SELinux.
Which they are morally entitled to do because that was the deal that all the contributors made when they donated code to the components RH uses to build that distribution. In the case of SELinux, they get to integrate work done by the NSA, funded by our tax dollars.
When someone pays for RHEL, they get something that CentOS users don't get: If there ever is a problem, they have support from the very organization that did that integration and testing, and therefore has the institutional knowledge that no other will. What CentOS makes available for free is advertising for Red Hat's true product: Its people.
(I can't claim this observation is original. If you have not yet read ESR's "The Magic Cauldron", I encourage you to do so. http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/magic-cauldron/magic-cauldron.html)
Fundamentally, I do not see any theory of morality that makes CentOS immoral while still keeping Red Hat itself moral. In the context of persuading PHBs to use Linux, any discussion of such a theory only plants the seeds of doubt as to the morality of the entire Linux ecosystem. We already have a huge problem with people who have been conditioned by the BSA to the idea that using someone's software without paying them (money) for it is inherently "wrong". The GPL says you pay those people back by paying your own users forward. That is the basis of our community.
So, rather than treading on ground that can become a FUDdy quagmire, I would prefer telling those PHBs that an enterprise can legally AND ethically run CentOS on non-production systems, where no support from the Red Hat will be desired, while paying for RHEL on those mission-critical servers. That is an advantage that RHEL has over proprietary OS licensing models.
And while it's equally true that CentOS can be run on production systems, again without support from RH, I wouldn't suggest doing so. If your business depends on those systems working, you'd better have the support in place to keep them working. That, however, is not a moral argument, but a practical one.
On Mon, Nov 3, 2008 at 8:29 AM, Monty J. Harder mjharder@gmail.com wrote:
On Sun, Nov 2, 2008 at 11:25 PM, Jeffrey Watts jeffrey.w.watts@gmail.comwrote:
I appreciate your position, but you have to realize that if you're using CentOS, you're not using it for the GPLed parts. You're using it because Red Hat built and regression tested an extremely stable distribution. You're using it because Red Hat spent the time and money to make third party apps like Oracle run well on it. You're using it because they took the time to integrate things like SELinux.
Fundamentally, I do not see any theory of morality that makes CentOS immoral while still keeping Red Hat itself moral.
CentOS isn't providing any value-add. They simply strip branding and call it their own. That's not adhering to the spirit of the GPL, the idea that you take someone else's software, add value, and release that value into the wild. The only "value" they add is providing a way to circumvent Red Hat's distribution model for their binaries.
To use a car analogy (albiet a weak one), if I take a Toyota and rip off all the Toyota branding and glue on Honda branding, that's immoral. If I take a Toyota and soup up the engine, put in a different interior, and upgrade the stereo, then glue on my Honda branding, that's moral.
The GPL is intended to ensure that if you enhance software (bug fixes, security fixes, feature enhancements, etc) you must provide the source for those when you give your program to the community. It's not intended to allow you to re-brand software and call it your own.
Personally, I'm up in the air about CentOS. But I certainly see Jeffrey's points.
On Mon, Nov 03, 2008 at 10:45:19AM -0600, Christofer C. Bell wrote:
CentOS isn't providing any value-add. They simply strip branding and call it their own. That's not adhering to the spirit of the GPL, the idea that
Where can I read the guidelines for adhering to "the spirit of the GPL." I've been unable to locate that document. All I have to go on is the actual words of the written GPL.
you take someone else's software, add value, and release that value into the wild. The only "value" they add is providing a way to circumvent Red Hat's distribution model for their binaries.
To use a car analogy (albiet a weak one), if I take a Toyota and rip off all the Toyota branding and glue on Honda branding, that's immoral. If I take a Toyota and soup up the engine, put in a different interior, and upgrade the stereo, then glue on my Honda branding, that's moral.
Let me strengthen it for you. What about if I take all the parts for a Toyota (legally obtained), and assemble them myself, except I don't put the Toyota branding on it, but rather put my own branding on it. I think that's a better analogy for what CentOS is doing.
The GPL is intended to ensure that if you enhance software (bug fixes, security fixes, feature enhancements, etc) you must provide the source for those when you give your program to the community. It's not intended to allow you to re-brand software and call it your own.
I don't see where I'm not allowed to do exactly that, but I've never seen a copy of "the spirit of the GPL," only the actual words of the written GPL. What you describe are additional restrictions on what the community can do with the software, which again only exist in "the spirit of the GPL", which I still haven't studied to see what it permits me to do.
Personally, I'm up in the air about CentOS. But I certainly see Jeffrey's points.
-- Chris
Thanks, -- Hal
I think the very fact that RedHat voluntarily, and outside of any obligation of the GPL, makes their sources publicly available to everyone, demonstrates that they tangibly encourage, or are at least complicit with the existence of CentOS.
On Mon, Nov 3, 2008 at 11:17, Hal Duston hald@kc.rr.com wrote:
Let me strengthen it for you. What about if I take all the parts for a Toyota (legally obtained), and assemble them myself, except I don't put the Toyota branding on it, but rather put my own branding on it. I think that's a better analogy for what CentOS is doing.
Actually that's not why they do that.
The source would get out regardless of what they do, as any customer who purchased a copy of RHEL would be legally able to release the SRPMs. The GPL requires that customers receive a copy of the source. They make their SRPMs publicly available because they want to be transparent and because they want their changes and improvements to Open Source programs to be fed back into the projects that originated them. They want to make it easy for their customers to customize their software for their needs.
They certainly didn't publicly release them in order to encourage someone to take their work, rebrand it, and undercut their core business. That's silly.
Jeffrey.
On Mon, Nov 3, 2008 at 11:24 AM, Billy Crook billycrook@gmail.com wrote:
I think the very fact that RedHat voluntarily, and outside of any obligation of the GPL, makes their sources publicly available to everyone, demonstrates that they tangibly encourage, or are at least complicit with the existence of CentOS.
--
"He that would make his own liberty secure must guard even his enemy from oppression; for if he violates this duty he establishes a precedent that will reach to himself." -- Thomas Paine
On Mon, Nov 3, 2008 at 11:17 AM, Hal Duston hald@kc.rr.com wrote:
On Mon, Nov 03, 2008 at 10:45:19AM -0600, Christofer C. Bell wrote:
CentOS isn't providing any value-add. They simply strip branding and
call
it their own. That's not adhering to the spirit of the GPL, the idea
that
Where can I read the guidelines for adhering to "the spirit of the GPL." I've been unable to locate that document. All I have to go on is the actual words of the written GPL.
First off, I'm not an armchair lawyer and I don't look for loopholes in "The Law" to exploit for my benefit so this argument of yours is lost on me. I believe the GPL is intended, based on Richard Stallman's exhaustive explications of his ideas, to be intended to encourage (albeit forcefully) developers to share their contributions with the rest of the community. Re-branding isn't a contribution in my view, it is a theft of ideas. It is taking someone else's labor and "making it yours" without providing value-add.
you take someone else's software, add value, and release that value into the
wild. The only "value" they add is providing a way to circumvent Red
Hat's
distribution model for their binaries.
To use a car analogy (albiet a weak one), if I take a Toyota and rip off
all
the Toyota branding and glue on Honda branding, that's immoral. If I
take a
Toyota and soup up the engine, put in a different interior, and upgrade
the
stereo, then glue on my Honda branding, that's moral.
Let me strengthen it for you. What about if I take all the parts for a Toyota (legally obtained), and assemble them myself, except I don't put the Toyota branding on it, but rather put my own branding on it. I think that's a better analogy for what CentOS is doing.
Perhaps that's closer to what they're doing, I still don't think it's right.
The GPL is intended to ensure that if you enhance software (bug fixes, security fixes, feature enhancements, etc) you must provide the source
for
those when you give your program to the community. It's not intended to allow you to re-brand software and call it your own.
I don't see where I'm not allowed to do exactly that, but I've never seen a copy of "the spirit of the GPL," only the actual words of the written GPL. What you describe are additional restrictions on what the community can do with the software, which again only exist in "the spirit of the GPL", which I still haven't studied to see what it permits me to do.
Again, I don't nitpick the GPL and look for loopholes. I go by what I feel Richard Stallman intended. Your contention that there is no single "spirit of the GPL" document notwithstanding.
Personally, I'm up in the air about CentOS. But I certainly see
Jeffrey's
points.
My own reason for being "up in the air" about CentOS is that I don't care for Red Hat's distribution model. While it's perfectly "legal" for them to refuse to provide their distribution freely to users who have not purchased a support contract, and certainly fits in the "letter" of the GPL, I think it's wrong. In order to receive Red Hat's enhancements to GPL software directly from Red Hat, I'm *required* to pay for a support contract.
The "letter" of the GPL is only that I'm allowed source code to binaries I receive. The spirit of the GPL, in my view, is that they distribute binaries they have enhanced (in whatever form that distribution takes place), and they are free to ask for money for access to them -- I feel those binaries should also be provided freely (ie; if distribution of binaries takes place, it should also take place in a form that is free). Obviously they already provide free source code.
I'm honestly surprised I don't see more people bellyaching about Red Hat Enterprise Linux's distribution model than I see about CentOS.
On Mon, Nov 03, 2008 at 11:36:55AM -0600, Christofer C. Bell wrote:
First off, I'm not an armchair lawyer and I don't look for loopholes in "The Law" to exploit for my benefit so this argument of yours is lost on me. I believe the GPL is intended, based on Richard Stallman's exhaustive explications of his ideas, to be intended to encourage (albeit forcefully) developers to share their contributions with the rest of the community. Re-branding isn't a contribution in my view, it is a theft of ideas. It is taking someone else's labor and "making it yours" without providing value-add.
--SNIP--
Again, I don't nitpick the GPL and look for loopholes. I go by what I feel Richard Stallman intended. Your contention that there is no single "spirit of the GPL" document notwithstanding.
I can't even figure out how to differentiante what you might view as a loophole from what I might view as a permitted use, or vice versa. That's where the problem lies. RMS, ESR, Bruce Perens, Linus, and Alan Cox all have different views of what the spirit of the GPL morally and ethically permits. What everybody does (for the most part) agree upon, however, is that the actual GPL legally permits. That's why that is exactly what I follow when deciding what to do.
--SNIP--
My own reason for being "up in the air" about CentOS is that I don't care for Red Hat's distribution model. While it's perfectly "legal" for them to refuse to provide their distribution freely to users who have not purchased a support contract, and certainly fits in the "letter" of the GPL, I think it's wrong. In order to receive Red Hat's enhancements to GPL software directly from Red Hat, I'm *required* to pay for a support contract.
The "letter" of the GPL is only that I'm allowed source code to binaries I receive. The spirit of the GPL, in my view, is that they distribute binaries they have enhanced (in whatever form that distribution takes place), and they are free to ask for money for access to them -- I feel those binaries should also be provided freely (ie; if distribution of binaries takes place, it should also take place in a form that is free). Obviously they already provide free source code.
I'm honestly surprised I don't see more people bellyaching about Red Hat Enterprise Linux's distribution model than I see about CentOS.
I don't complain about either RHEL, or CentOS, as they are both in full compliance with the legal requirements of the GPL. If they were to take the software I have released under the GPL, I would have no standing to complain in either case, as I am fully aware of the permitted actions of anyone receiving that software.
-- Chris
Thanks, -- Hal
On Monday 03 November 2008 11:36:55 am Christofer C. Bell wrote:
My own reason for being "up in the air" about CentOS is that I don't care for Red Hat's distribution model. While it's perfectly "legal" for them to refuse to provide their distribution freely to users who have not purchased a support contract, and certainly fits in the "letter" of the GPL, I think it's wrong. In order to receive Red Hat's enhancements to GPL software directly from Red Hat, I'm *required* to pay for a support contract.
The "letter" of the GPL is only that I'm allowed source code to binaries I receive. The spirit of the GPL, in my view, is that they distribute binaries they have enhanced (in whatever form that distribution takes place), and they are free to ask for money for access to them -- I feel those binaries should also be provided freely (ie; if distribution of binaries takes place, it should also take place in a form that is free). Obviously they already provide free source code.
Richard Stallman has always supported charging for Free software. RedHat would be in line with the "spirit" of the GPL (according to Stallman) if they charged for their enhancements *and didn't provide any support still*.
I may be incorrect on this but, I have always thought that RedHat started their business to sell support for Linux, not necessarily their version of Linux. RedHat started with only one distribution, freely downloadable, and built their business on selling "official support" for that distribution.
At the time, I was running Slackware servers and will admit that I didn't really follow the reasoning behind Redhat's split into Fedora and RHEL. My guess was, without really following along, that RedHat decided to garner the cool system administration tools that made their distribution "enterprise ready" for themselves, and release and support Fedora freely onward.
If this is true, then I don't see why CentOS is in the wrong and/or hurting RHEL. Cent is not selling support for their distribution. Although, I've been to their website and read a bit. It IS kinda quirky how they refer to RedHat as "a prominent North American Enterprise Linux vendor." Almost like they feel like they are stealing.
On Mon, Nov 3, 2008 at 11:04 PM, Ty Unes riverty@kc.rr.com wrote:
I may be incorrect on this but, I have always thought that RedHat started their business to sell support for Linux, not necessarily their version of Linux. RedHat started with only one distribution, freely downloadable, and built their business on selling "official support" for that distribution.
At the time, I was running Slackware servers and will admit that I didn't really follow the reasoning behind Redhat's split into Fedora and RHEL. My guess was, without really following along, that RedHat decided to garner the cool system administration tools that made their distribution "enterprise ready" for themselves, and release and support Fedora freely onward.
If this is true, then I don't see why CentOS is in the wrong and/or hurting RHEL. Cent is not selling support for their distribution. Although, I've been to their website and read a bit. It IS kinda quirky how they refer to RedHat as "a prominent North American Enterprise Linux vendor." Almost like they feel like they are stealing.
I think they do that purely out of trademark issues -- specifically not wanting their brand associated with the unsupported CentOS
On Mon, Nov 3, 2008 at 11:04 PM, Ty Unes riverty@kc.rr.com wrote:
If this is true, then I don't see why CentOS is in the wrong and/or hurting RHEL. Cent is not selling support for their distribution. Although, I've been to their website and read a bit. It IS kinda quirky how they refer to RedHat as "a prominent North American Enterprise Linux vendor." Almost like they feel like they are stealing.
Just to address this one point, the one about the "North American Enterprise Linux Vendor," they were required to do that by Red Hat in a cease and desist letter. They used to just say they're a rebranded RHEL. Red Hat shut that down.
Red Hat started out making their money selling the software in a shrink wrapped box with manuals. However, that business model became progressively obsolete with the growth of the Internet and CD burners. They also found that folks like Mandrake would just take their work and undercut them on publishing deals (like Macmillian - they didn't even bother to remove some of the Red Hat branding).
Red Hat gradually moved their business from one of selling CDs to one of selling support. However, they found they were spending an inordinate amount of time and money supporting a desktop OS that wasn't generating very much support revenue. They decided to create an enterprise OS called RHEL that they would extensively support and market to companies, and create a desktop community OS project called Fedora.
Red Hat didn't do a good job with the Fedora spin-off, and most of that had to do with the way they announced it - it seemed to the community that Fedora was being abandoned by Red Hat. In reality it wasn't true, and by Fedora 3 the distribution really had taken off. Fedora's going very strong right now, and is innovating.
Jeffrey.
On Mon, Nov 3, 2008 at 11:04 PM, Ty Unes riverty@kc.rr.com wrote:
I may be incorrect on this but, I have always thought that RedHat started their business to sell support for Linux, not necessarily their version of Linux. RedHat started with only one distribution, freely downloadable, and built their business on selling "official support" for that distribution.
At the time, I was running Slackware servers and will admit that I didn't really follow the reasoning behind Redhat's split into Fedora and RHEL. My guess was, without really following along, that RedHat decided to garner the cool system administration tools that made their distribution "enterprise ready" for themselves, and release and support Fedora freely onward.
If this is true, then I don't see why CentOS is in the wrong and/or hurting RHEL. Cent is not selling support for their distribution. Although, I've been to their website and read a bit. It IS kinda quirky how they refer to RedHat as "a prominent North American Enterprise Linux vendor." Almost like they feel like they are stealing.
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On Mon, Nov 3, 2008 at 10:45 AM, Christofer C. Bell < christofer.c.bell@gmail.com> wrote:
CentOS isn't providing any value-add. They simply strip branding and call it their own. That's not adhering to the spirit of the GPL, the idea that you take someone else's software, add value, and release that value into the wild. The only "value" they add is providing a way to circumvent Red Hat's distribution model for their binaries.
That's one of the fundamental freedoms of the GPL, yes. But it is hardly the only one. The GPL explicitly gives the recipients of the code the right to redistribute the code whether they "add value" or not. The mere act of redistributing code is arguably providing value; ask the folks at ITEC who got Ubuntu CDs that Leo burned. Again, Ubuntu has committed to that redistribution always being unencumbered, with Canonical support sold separately.
Precisely because RHEL is a package deal of freely-redistributable software and a support contract, its status is murkier. The deal under which RH got all that code to which they add value says that their customers have the right to make and use copies of the software. The RH distribution model comes rather close to the line of violating the spirit of the GPL. If CentOS etc. did not exist, some might think that it crossed the line. The existence of CentOS proves that RH is in compliance with their moral obligations to all those coders whose work they use.
The GPL is intended to ensure that if you enhance software (bug fixes, security fixes, feature enhancements, etc) you must provide the source for those when you give your program to the community. It's not intended to allow you to re-brand software and call it your own.
It not only is intended to allow re-branding; it requires it in some circumstances. CentOS is FORCED to "re-brand" the software by Red Hat. To keep the RH name on it would violate the RH trademarks.
Here's a thought. Ask RMS what he thinks of the morality of CentOS and RedHat. I suspect he'll agree that the former is every bit as moral as the latter.
I understand your position, but I believe that in our community there are constructive choices and destructive ones.
Buying from Novell is a destructive choice, because they sold out to Microsoft. Rewarding them with business isn't a good idea. Using CentOS instead of buying RHEL also is a destructive choice, as the dollars taken away from Red Hat prevents the community from getting some of the hard things done that typically are best able to be done by companies.
You can disagree, and that's okay. I've made it clear that my position is one that many don't have, but while you may find my position impractical, I feel that it's easily defensible morally.
Jeffrey.
On Mon, Nov 3, 2008 at 8:29 AM, Monty J. Harder mjharder@gmail.com wrote:
Which they are morally entitled to do because that was the deal that all the contributors made when they donated code to the components RH uses to build that distribution. In the case of SELinux, they get to integrate work done by the NSA, funded by our tax dollars.
When someone pays for RHEL, they get something that CentOS users don't get: If there ever is a problem, they have support from the very organization that did that integration and testing, and therefore has the institutional knowledge that no other will. What CentOS makes available for free is advertising for Red Hat's true product: Its people.
(I can't claim this observation is original. If you have not yet read ESR's "The Magic Cauldron", I encourage you to do so. http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/magic-cauldron/magic-cauldron.htmlhttp://www.catb.org/%7Eesr/writings/magic-cauldron/magic-cauldron.html )
Fundamentally, I do not see any theory of morality that makes CentOS immoral while still keeping Red Hat itself moral. In the context of persuading PHBs to use Linux, any discussion of such a theory only plants the seeds of doubt as to the morality of the entire Linux ecosystem. We already have a huge problem with people who have been conditioned by the BSA to the idea that using someone's software without paying them (money) for it is inherently "wrong". The GPL says you pay those people back by paying your own users forward. That is the basis of our community.
So, rather than treading on ground that can become a FUDdy quagmire, I would prefer telling those PHBs that an enterprise can legally AND ethically run CentOS on non-production systems, where no support from the Red Hat will be desired, while paying for RHEL on those mission-critical servers. That is an advantage that RHEL has over proprietary OS licensing models.
And while it's equally true that CentOS can be run on production systems, again without support from RH, I wouldn't suggest doing so. If your business depends on those systems working, you'd better have the support in place to keep them working. That, however, is not a moral argument, but a practical one.
Coincidentally, I came across an article about code contributions. This article specifically mentions the contributions (or lack thereof) of CentOS and others.
"Then there are the distros that base themselves off of other distros, like Ubuntu and [Lance Davis'] CentOS. These distros have yet another layer between them and the original developers. Patches rarely, if ever, flow backwards into an upstream distro, and the developers are very unlikely to push their changes into the upstream packages as they don't feel the need or don't realize the issues involved as they rely on the upstream distro so tightly," said Kroah-Hartman.
http://www.sdtimes.com/RED_HAT_TOPS_LIST_OF_CORPORATE_LINUX_CODE_CONTRIBUTOR...
Kroah-Hartman is the maintainer of the USB kernel subsystem. His views are clearly more from a Linux kernel perspective, but they're interesting nonetheless. There were some surprising statistics in regards to the Canonical contribution - they make me wonder if perhaps something was missed. Perhaps the Canonical folks use Debian email addresses?
Jeffrey.
On Sun, Nov 2, 2008 at 9:36 PM, Monty J. Harder mjharder@gmail.com wrote:
Red Hat gains something else of value from the cloners' existence: There is now a far larger base of machines running binaries compiled from the same sources that RH uses, so if a CentOS user finds a bug, and reports it to the CentOS folks, they can confirm that the bug does in fact exist, write it up and get information to upstream, which would include RH. RH isn't having to do any work to support these machines but gets these gamma testers to help them find bugs.
On Mon, Nov 3, 2008 at 3:38 PM, Jeffrey Watts jeffrey.w.watts@gmail.com wrote:
Kroah-Hartman is the maintainer of the USB kernel subsystem. His views are clearly more from a Linux kernel perspective, but they're interesting nonetheless. There were some surprising statistics in regards to the Canonical contribution - they make me wonder if perhaps something was missed. Perhaps the Canonical folks use Debian email addresses?
It's a fairly common complaint that Canonical only looks after Canonical, rarely contribution to new projects, or contributing to upstread projects at all. Just patching as necessary to make things "perfect" on Ubuntu. One can contrast that with Fedora's policy of patching "locally" on on exceptions, having all packages adopted upstream instead.
One arguement in favour of this behaviour of Canonical is that they are doing plenty of good for the community by making the experience very user friendly. Personally: this contribution of theirs is not to be ignored, but code doesn't write itself, and user friendliness doesn't generally go along with encouraging users to submit bugs whenever something breaks.
I have never heard anyone argue that the actual development effort by Canonical's staff is greater than reflected by the statistics -- little to none. So I would say the numbers are correct. Whether or not you consider their other contribution equal is a different arguement.
You're not implying Gentoo is a derivative of BSD, are you? It is not. It just does a few things similar to how FreeBSD does them. Read http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/articles/making-the-distro-p3.xml for more info about how/why Gentoo uses some FreeBSD practices. It no more branches from FreeBSD than does SuSE branch from RHEL. It just emulates FreeBSD to some extent, as does SuSE emulate RHEL to some extent.
Gentoo is from the Slackware ancestry of GNU+Linux, though it's changed alot. Any distro in the Slackware tree has changed and branched widely from its original roots. These distros are used and developed by enthusiasts, who actively try to break with the past and do new and awesome things. There's a lot of churn, and I don't think the derivative distros so much care about retaining compatibility with their parent distro's practices. At least not as much as say, Ubuntu retains compatibility with Debian stuff. Gentoo is extremely fun if you like digging around in the innards of things. However, most sysadmins don't want to dig that deeply on every system in production. There's something to be said for knowing you are running exactly the same program as 10,000 other people. And when all of your binaries are compiled uniquely to you, nobody else in the entire world might have a similar system, and that makes support extremely difficult.
If you want to install gentoo, follow these instructions: http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/handbook/
On Sat, Nov 1, 2008 at 16:04, David Nicol davidnicol@gmail.com wrote:
I guess BSD doesn't get included because Gentoo isn't "major."
BSD didn't get included because BSD isn't a distro. FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, DragonflyBSD are distributions. BSD belongs in a group with Linux, Plan9, OSX, NT, OS/2, DOS, and other TYPES of distributions, because that's what it is; a TYPE of distribution. BSD is (obviously) more different from Linux than any Linux distro is from another Linux distro. I didn't bring it up because we weren't talking about BSD, or OSX or Windows, and because I'm not as familiar with BSD as I am with GNU+Linux.
Gentoo didn't get included because it's also not so much an distro as it is a formulae and laboratory for constructing your OWN distro. Gentoo has install media, but you can install Gentoo from any shell with wget and an internet connection. It is also, unambiguously, not major. Especially not in companies that depend on their computers being up and avaliable all the time.
I heard of one company, a law firm, that used gentoo on a server. Their admin was interviewed on a podcast I listen to. I think it was The Linux Link Tech Show. I tried to find the guys name while writing this email. I think the law offices were what became the Software Freedom Law Center. Alas, I was unable to locate the episode, but did find this humorous quote from TLLTS' listener chat logs: "21:14 < aaranya> Using gentoo is like trying to find the square root of pi -- in Roman numerals" #techshow on thelinuxlink.net
Being that Roman numerals can not express decimals, I'd say that numerical exercise is a little more difficult than installing and using gentoo on a day to day basis. If your boss' first impression of GNU+Linux was Gentoo, and a single thing wasn't done completely right, he'd run screaming and never, ever consider Linux again. Ever. Throwing a Newbie into Gentoo would just be cruel. Gentoo's greatest asset is it's forums and wiki, which often document various GNU+Linux software and practices extrenely well, and agnostic enough to distribution that you can apply that knowledge to other distros. Recently, the gentoo wiki suffered massive massive damage though, and is being rebuilt. http://gentoo-wiki.com/
--- On Sat, 11/1/08, David Nicol davidnicol@gmail.com wrote:
The three major ancestries of GNU+Linux are RedHat, Debian, and Slackware.
I guess BSD doesn't get included because Gentoo isn't "major."
I'd suspect that Gentoo doesn't get included because it appears to be having serious issues with developers not really working well together and developing new versions of Gentoo.
New versions keep getting canceled because developers can't agree on the proper development of new versions. 2007.1 got canceled (apparently because 2007.1 wouldn't get released until 2008), and now I read on Gentoo.org that 2008.1 has just been canceled as well. No one seems to be even trying to herd the cats anymore.
Gentoo may not be completely dead, but (metaphorically speaking) John Cleese has put its head in striking distance of Eric Idle's club...
Well, to be fair, regardless of its development status it doesn't get included because it's truly worthless for business use. It's nearly impossible to support given the way it's installed.
But yeah, it looks like it's dying to me, too.
Jeffrey.
On Sat, Nov 1, 2008 at 11:46 PM, Leo Mauler webgiant@yahoo.com wrote:
I'd suspect that Gentoo doesn't get included because it appears to be having serious issues with developers not really working well together and developing new versions of Gentoo.
New versions keep getting canceled because developers can't agree on the proper development of new versions. 2007.1 got canceled (apparently because 2007.1 wouldn't get released until 2008), and now I read on Gentoo.org that 2008.1 has just been canceled as well. No one seems to be even trying to herd the cats anymore.
Gentoo may not be completely dead, but (metaphorically speaking) John Cleese has put its head in striking distance of Eric Idle's club...
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Arthur Pemberton -
Billy Crook -
Christofer C. Bell -
David Nicol -
Hal Duston -
Haworth, Michael A. -
Jeffrey Watts -
Leo Mauler -
Luke Dashjr -
Monty J. Harder -
Nathan Cerny -
Phil Thayer -
Sean Crago -
Ty Unes